Sun Sessions : Musicians Get Sound Advice at Summer Solstice Folk Festival Workshops

Farther north, the longest day of the year may be celebrated aboard rafts racing in rivers newly free of ice or perhaps with baseball bats and gloves in a midnight game under the sun.

But the instruments of choice at the California Traditional Music Society’s 16th annual Summer Solstice Folk Festival this weekend are dulcimers, fiddles, banjos, bagpipes, autoharps, guitars, flutes and more dulcimers.

More than 1,500 visitors had arrived by midday Saturday to partake of the music, dance and storytelling at Soka University.

They included Art Newman of Sherman Oaks, who has played guitar for 20 years but took up the mandolin recently. Pausing after a morning “Mandolin Boot Camp” and dropping off his 8-year-old daughter, Elise, at a guitar workshop, he marveled at the festival’s ability to “expose people to all styles of music.”

The three-day festival began Friday evening and continues through tonight. Along with the more than 300 workshops, there are ethnic food vendors and exhibits of crafts makers and musical-instrument builders.

A big favorite in the workshops is the dulcimer, a stringed instrument used in Western popular, folk and art music, and common in North Africa, India, China and Iran.

At the festival, sessions are being offered for beginning, intermediate and advanced players with focus on such areas as “Chord Magic with Cowboy Classics” and “Write Your Own Tunes” on the fretted dulcimer, and South American music and “Rhythms of Irish Music” for the hammered dulcimer.

Author-choreographer-dancer France Bourque-Moreau of Montreal said that even though she and her husband, Yves Moreau, usually work with professionals, “we enjoy doing the easy dances.”

Her husband was just then lining up 80 beginners for some Romanian folk dancing.

“This isn’t necessarily meant to be performed,” she said. “It is meant to be enjoyed. There is something beautiful about the aesthetics of a whole group moving together.”

Returning festival-goer Dylan Vigus, 11, of Topanga came back this year to hear his favorite storyteller, Emmy award-winner Mark Lewis of Eugene, Ore. At Lewis’ “Word Pictures” session for children, enthusiastic adults outnumbered youngsters 4 to 1.

“My instruments are my voice, my face and my body,” Lewis said. “And my job is to reawaken the art of storytelling. It’s not dying--it’s just sleeping.”

Today’s workshops will include sessions on belly dancing, Scottish Highland dancing, bawdy songs (recommended for adults only) and techniques for the harp.

The festival runs from 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Admission is $20 ($10 after 3 p.m.) and free to those 12 and under. Parking is $3. Soka University is located at Malibu Canyon Road and Mulholland Highway.